Today I take down the show in La Merde. My main concern, show-wise, is where to store the unsold (read: ALL) work. Answer: here. On my couch. I don’t have a lot of room in the studio so maybe here where it’s warm. It was a good show, the work was totally pro and well-crafted. Got no complaints art-wise.
Now then, new work. Here’s a pic which we’ll break down in a sec:
What we’ve got going here are a few larger text bits, fewer words, bigger letters, smaller communication, louder method. I’ve been a MASSIVE critic of the school of ‘large and short’ in text-based work (and still am) where all someone has to do is bang out a half-wit slogan such as “EAT YOUR VEGETABLES” then hire someone to paste it to a Zeppelin and bing-bang whambo slam bam you’ve got art! Expensive art, too. Here, hmn, what I’m trying to do (beside move away from the denser storytelling I’ve been up to this past year) is learn to take a smaller phrase and imbue it with some kind of abstract emotional/intellectual content via the handling of materials. In short, trying to learn how to paint, something I really don’t know how to do. It’s a kind of half-ass birthday present to myself, a challenge that’s going to make me cry, I don’t see how it doesn’t.
That said, hmn, here’s a few more pics of crap in process before I tell you why 1. they suck and 2. what to do about it:
To this:
I like words but I have no idea what to do with them. Check this mess out:
Slow moving train of text and abstract and what the hell is happening? It feels like a college freshman trying to be deep and bang senior prospectives on weekend campus visits. Not that I know anything about that. The Be A Man line is taken from my fave rock and roll line of all time, “How can he be a man if he doesn’t smoke the same cigarette as me?” from Satisfaction by the Stones. Quintessential man, rock thru and thru. The other line I like, well another line I like is “It’s such a gamble when you get a face” from Blank Generation by Richard Hell. I could do a whole show based on that song, or line.
Then there’s this fragment:
Ok, what you’re seeing is my interest in covering over work but letting the text stand out. Remind anyone of the Le Morte de Gaia series where text was both legible and obscured? True this is what grabs me, making the straight-forward difficult, adding complexity thru disintegration and forcing the viewer to work for what they get. The more recent heavily layered pieces (Richter and Checkers) work the same way:
One thing that’s also thematic thru my work is use of limited palette. I don’t get color complexity, even my clothing today is black and blue w/ white laces. In fact I feel most comfortable working in black and white so while laying out Rainbow in color (Neil Young, by the way), I can’t get past the color, I can’t fathom what to do next because each color element seems to stand on its own, there’s no cohesion with each section fighting to remain viable. It’s like a schoolyard of children screaming for attention. Feh, who needs that? So I’m going back to black and white, and shades of black and white.
Which is where my friend Mark Gatewood comes in. Hold on, check out his website: markgatewood.com. I asked Mark for help this morning. I KNOW what I want to do, I know how I want to work with the larger text moving forward but I needed an art lesson. So Mark gave me New Acrylics / Essential Workbook by Rheni Tauchid. Looks damn fine with techniques to die for. Technique, I have no technique so this’ll be a tome worth seriously reading over the next few days. Honestly, look at the paintings on pages 133, 136, 141 and 147. Acrylic! So yeah, I’ve got a lot to learn.
There you have it.
If you’ve got acrylic teaching thoughts, think Layers and Semi-transparent Obscuring, drop me a line. Otherwise go do something that makes you happy. Ok?
Posted in Process
Tags: acrylic techniques, fiona banner, glenn ligon, New Acrylics, North Korea nuclear weapons, Rheni Tauchid, Richard Prince paintings, text art
